Sadly, we’ve recently experienced a bad run with the Helium network and its associated systems over the last week.
We’ve had issues with poor performance of the APIs, Explorer and the Helium app. We also had the much anticipated upgrade to PoCv11 fail a couple of times, only to be postponed a few weeks. And also for a couple of days this week the various systems were out of action completely while we awaited some urgent fixes to be put in place for the validators and then updates pushed out to all hotspots. We’ve seen ENORMOUS growth in the past two months so it’s not surprising we’ve had some growing pains. Fortunately, at the time of writing this, the systems are back online and performance has improved significantly and all systems are normal. Touch wood!
If you’re ever wondering what’s going on and whether you specifically have a problem OR whether it is a more widespread issue bookmark the Helium Status page. It lists all of the systems and whether they are degraded in some way. Beneath the main table there are also detailed descriptions of the issues and their status. The Helium team do an EXCELLENT job of keeping this up to date. You can also sign up for email updates to stay in the loop. Highly recommended.
When there’s some issue or change in hotspot behaviour, it’s a pretty common practise for people to immediately assume their setup is broken and needs ‘fixing’ when in fact most of the time there’s probably an upstream issue.
As I’ve mentioned before, so long as YOU haven’t changed anything, PLEASE resist trying to fix things that aren’t broken! A reboot is about all you should attempt. Systemic issues are not common, but they do happen from time to time. Check what’s going on with the various systems first before assuming yours is out of whack.
